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I will be putting up a site soon and need advice on an affiliate program. I want to make it lifetime commissions.
I need to know what affilate network to go through. I am not savvy enough to do it on my own. I am also concerned about this spyware stuff. Please enlighten me.
Thanks

I second what cjshoppingnetwork said. You'll find lots of advice on the issues you bring up if you search the board. However, you've got some significant work ahead of you. You'll get as many opinions as there are members of ABW.

Best of luck.

By the way, if you product can guarantee me more time on the golf course, I'm yours.

It's great to see you wanting to offer lifetime commissions on your affiliate program. It shows committment to affiliates! None of the affiliate networks really are geared to offer lifetime commissions so you will probably want to get your own software and utilize a 2 tier commission structure to help build your affiliate organization.

At NewWebsite.com, we use the software from www.groundbreak.com which works great for tracking recurring commissions for our hosting services. I definitely recommend it and it is very affordable. www.MyAffiliateProgram.com is more expensive but is a very good option.

I am a Befree merchant and also offer lifetime cookies. Befree's cookie is only good for a maximum of 120 days, so if you want lifetime cookies you'll have to handle the cookies yourself.

It is not that difficult and any decent web programmer can do it.

The advantage of doing it yourself is that it gives you more options. For example we log the affiliate data in a database, so even if the customer's cookie disappears we can still track the sale to the affiliate. If the customer uses multiple computers; (laptop, work, home). Our affiliates will still get their commission.

We do use multiple methods to try and track repeat users. I can't give all the details, but my success is keyed to how much my affiliates sell, so it is in my best interest to make sure every affiliate sale is accurately tracked.

Our primary key into our system is email address, similiar to Amazon.com.

I agree with you, accurately tracking affiliate sale is also very high on my list.

For the record, I too have just setup lifetime tracking for our program and am curious as to what others use. Since we do not ask the user to register for an account, I am also using email as a unique identifier for lifetime tracking.